Interesting! I got a powerful sense of deja vu while reading over the bit about the artifact that you can't look away from, though. I'm trying to remember whether this is something you've commented on before, or if this is just something that every philosopher is inexorably drawn to.

Also, there's the sentence "The negative space beyond border of the screen becomes a thing to be wielded as protection, and a glance a freighted act." Is this a typo, or can you use freight like that? I guess you could say that a glance is a loaded act, so the synonym works too, and it doesn't seem incongruous with the rest of your prose. I'm just learning more about weird writing mechanics, I guess.

I think so! I have read the word 'freight' used as a verb before - for example by the Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz who described Hitler's early diatribes as "freighted with meaning" in light of later events. In any case, I'm not sure where you might have read before of an artifact you can't look away from; I just know that, try as I might, I couldn't avoid writing about it.

How could I forget? This week was an article written for Sneaky Bastards, a newly-launched stealth gaming blog. I'm going to link you to the redirect post on my own blog, so they can't sneakily track the link back to here and find out who John Brindle really is, but you should really check them out as they have some rather good articles.

The article is called The Inheritance of a Thief and argues for the continuing value of 'pure' or dedicated stealth games by identifying three crucial elements of the genre that aren't often found anywhere else.

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Metal Gear Solid was praised on release for the atmosphere and beauty its lush maps squeezed from the ageing PlayStation processor. But this was only possible because each one was roughly the size of two tennis courts. It didnâ€™t matter; the necessities of stealthy play forced a slow pace which masked their tiny size. Writ in the grammar of stealth games is a level of caution, both on the level of player verbs and of play objects. Slow modes of movement like crawling and creeping are essential to success, while common obstacles like guards, traps, cameras and noisy floors force you to pay careful attention to the environment. Avoidance tempts players to explore the world in search of secret routes, while observation demands they examine it carefully.

Following my current tradition (?) of forgetting to post stuff until way after it's up, here is a fairly opinionated article about Blizzard's swear filters and their approach to preventing community strife, which is simple-minded and causes more trouble to them than it's worth. Make sure to read the comments for some stunning examples of swear filtering from other games.

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Last month an old comrade got in touch to report her discovery that Blizzard had banned the word â€˜blackâ€™ from all guild names. Apparently somebody decided that in the racial powderkeg (?) of the WoW community, even the mere mention of a colour â€“ which happens to be the current preferred way for a majority of people to refer to other people whose skin looks different â€“ was too controversial and inflammatory to permit. Apparently they had also neglected to apply this logic to their own gameâ€™s Black Temple.

Itâ€™s as if Blizzard and its employees understand the notion that they are supposed to be moral, but donâ€™t really know how.

If for a second I would play the devils advocate I would guess the reasoning being is that they didn't want to put resources into dealing with all the guild names. So it's easier to ban all guilds from using the name black than seeing which ones use it for racially motivated reasons. So from that point not applying the rule to themselves would be explained as they obviously know there is no undertone in their own content.

Then again this is an horrible crowd management technique that my own country suffers under. Meaning Estonia is categorized as Eastern block and by that developers often veto their games by default from here. So it's a stupid situation where a hour long boat ride to Finland separates bad east from west. Some situations even promise to release a game in whole of Europe and later say oh well some countries in Europe won't be getting it either, making it seem like they forgot the eastern block made it's way to EU and other unions.

So in short they obviously went for the easy way out as they will still make money without a serious loss.

Actually World of Tanks has quite a similar and hilarious censor where they ban anything with ss or even the numbers 88 in nicknames/clans while NKVD in names is perfectly fine. Kind of a double standard meaning one death squad is banned while the other is ok. In a similar way I guess you should ban white in guild names as it can be used in a similar way against white people.

If for a second I would play the devils advocate I would guess the reasoning being is that they didn't want to put resources into dealing with all the guild names. So it's easier to ban all guilds from using the name black than seeing which ones use it for racially motivated reasons. So from that point not applying the rule to themselves would be explained as they obviously know there is no undertone in their own content.

This is true, and a good point, but a related issue I didn't really manage to pack in there is that Blizzard have with their names and their lore universe set a precedent for using colours in the names of orders, temples, citadels, whatever - indeed, of all possible universes where something with "black" in its name is unlikely to have anything to do with race, high fantasy is up there with the world of intelligence and special ops.

I imagine you probably agree with me about how rarely Blizzard would probably have to devote resources to racist guild names in reality. :p

It's been made abundantly clear to me since writing the article that Blizzard is by no means the only or even the worst offender for blanket censorship. Your World of Tanks example is another one which doesn't really make any sense. Although you could argue that if they're trying to halt neo-nazism and neo-fascist groups in their tracks (rather than simply ban all discussion of it) then these groups are usually a bigger threat (and more actually racist) than neo-communist groups.

If a guild or clan name is intended to be racist or offensive there will always be some way to make it so, and blanket bans only hinder standard group names unnecessarily. This is simply an issue that needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, as with offensive player names. I don't see the discussion here.

My disgrace of a brother Jimmy has...well...I guess I'll just leave this here. It is a shall-we-say novel contribution to the are-games-art debate, and if I had any spine at all I would delete it immediately...but god help me. I need the hits.

Well, we all knew that art was genitalia, it's not exactly something we're unaware of. In fact, video games, once they get past their reluctance to be proper art, may become the truest form of art, allowing people to interact with said bits.

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Worbat: You killing me constantly was so frustrating, I quit in disgust.

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[16:47] Jeff: British is not an ancestry. Britain is an accident of noble marriages, pregnancies, and deaths.

Well, we all knew that art was genitalia, it's not exactly something we're unaware of. In fact, video games, once they get past their reluctance to be proper art, may become the truest form of art, allowing people to interact with said bits.

to veil the game-world in a realistic guise is inherently detrimental to the goal of communicating game mechanics, because entities with digital, limited functions (an enemy which can move in eight directions on flat ground, for example) are disguised as having analogue, potentially infinite functions (a human being who can traverse a wide range of terrain types), and our knowledge of the latter impedes our ability to learn about the former. Put simply, with realistic-looking games the player has to learn what entities CANNOT do, whereas with abstract games each entity is a blank canvas, and the player can learn a truer sense of such entitiesâ€™ ludic abilities through trial and observation, unclouded by preconceptions based on a pseudo-realistic aesthetic.

(This is why, if one of your parents has ever walked in and watched you play a video game, they have probably asked some inane question along the lines of â€œwhy can he jump so high?â€ or â€œhow can he survive being shot so much?â€. A person with little inexperience of game rulesets will naturally apply real life rulesets to what they see on screen, and most gamers have (without realising) un-learned their real world expectations by immersing themselves in game worlds. My parents, of course, asked different questions: "why are you such a goddamned queer?" and "how in fuck's name haven't you beaten that boss yet?")

Saturday saw a return to normal service for the Brindle family, with a response from John Brindle to Bunbury's comparison of Metal Gear Solid and Pac Man. An explanation for our absence soon segues into extolling the joys of eating in MGS3.

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Because we depend for our sustenance on cramming other organic matter down our maw-tubes and swilling it about in our turbulent acid-bags, we cannot help but regard the activity as central to our emotional being; “you are what you eat.” When games tie that process to clear gains and losses in the player avatar’s size and capability, it acutely strengthens her identification with her player character.

I think Gabe Newell needs his fat to give the required amount of jollity to Valve's warm little community.

THIS WEEK ON THE BRINDLE BLOG: unearthing doctrinal parallels between retro indie platformer L'Abbaye Des Morts and the 13th century neo-Manichean heresy that inspired it. As it turns out, all trad platform games are Catharite, in some sense or another, and pitch the player as the sole element of agency in a world of toxic automatism.

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These games come off like some ancient theology. The question they prompt is, "what sick, twisted bastard created this place?" But their activities are also those fundamental to human interactions with videogame systems: watching for patterns, exploiting their automatism, getting around them with the playful and unpredictable consciousness that only a human can offer. And the figure of the demiurge, the evil creator who builds a reality specifically designed to kill or entrap you for as long as your divine spark temporarily inhabits its world, will be familiar to players.